Project Petrolhead

Drink driving is never acceptable. It’s stupid, careless and potentially catastrophic to you and those around you. That being said…

Circuit de la Sarthe, 1953. Le Mans to you and me. Jaguar are preparing their latest sports car to take on the gruelling endurance race. Its development consisted of taking the firm’s fastest sports car, the XK120, and throwing most of it away. The interior was stripped, exterior trim was removed, the bodyshell was smoothed out for better aero and the mighty 3.4 litre XK straight-six was beefed up to over 215bhp. The result became know as the XK120 Type C (for Competition) before it was shortened to just “C-Type”.

Three C-Types were deployed to France that year, and that’s where the trouble started. During the practice session before the big race, one of the team’s drivers, a young upstart named Stirling Moss, felt his car wasn’t quite up to scratch and asked for Jaguar to swap it out for their factory test car. Unfortunately, the number painted on the side of the test car was 18, a number that also happened to be painted on one of the other teams, that of Duncan Hamilton and Tony Rolt. After some brief back-and-forth with the French racing authorities, team number 18 were duly disqualified.

Merde.

In true British fashion, Hamilton and Rolt decided that the only thing left to do was to saddle up the C-Type, pop down to the nearest town, and get apocalyptically drunk. They spent the entire night on the booze and were found early the next morning in a restaurant nursing the mother of all hangovers over a cup of the strongest black coffee in France. The man who found them? Well, that was Jaguar boss William Lyons, and he had news. After some negotiations with the FIA (and a twenty-five-thousand-franc fine), team number 18 had been reinstated and would race in just six hours’ time!

Encore de la merde.

With an entire town’s worth of coffee surging through their systems, Hamilton and Rolt gunned it back to the circuit, determined to make the most of the last few hours before kick-off, running through the remaining practice session at full-chat. But it was no use. With just two hours to go, Hamilton pulled into the pit lane with uncontrollable shakes. All of the caffeine that had meant to sober them up had only resulted in making them more jittery, meaning that the highly-strung C-Type was even more of a handful. At this rate they were either going to crash immediately or in a few hours, caffeine crash would knock them both out of the race. There was only one more option.

Crack open the brandy… No, really.

With both drivers each necking a double-helping of “hair of the dog” before setting off, they were as fast as they had been in first practice, going toe-to-toe with the likes of Ferrari, Alfa Romeo and Aston Martin. Jaguar knew full well that Le Mans wasn’t just a race of brute force, endurance racing through the night meant that tactics were imperative. They also knew that a good third of any lap of Le Mans consisted of the 3.7-mile long Mulsanne straight, and that stopping a 50s sports car from over 120mph was an incredibly tricky business. Because of that, they’d spent years developing a revolutionary braking system in partnership with Dunlop, so that their teams could brake later and harder than anyone else on the grid, effectively shaving a few seconds off of every single lap, and in a race that covers over 300 laps, every second counts. (That magic braking system, by the way? Disc brakes. Now used on basically every car on sale today. Thanks, Jaguar.)

Hamilton and Rolt powered round the Circuit, utilising the C-Types class-leading brakes, lightweight construction and gutsy engine to average over 100mph for the duration of the 24-hour race. Not only did they finish, but miraculously, they won, opening up a 30-mile gap over the next fastest team and securing Jaguar their first One-Two finish, locking out the top two steps of the podium. And our two gentlemen racers, slightly squiffed and running on maybe an hour’s sleep at most, managed to make Le Mans history by finishing ahead of Formula One royalty like Stirling Moss, Hans Harmann, Alberto Ascari and Juan Manuel Fangio.

Not bad for two drunk drivers.